The Sociology of Elite Education
Agnès Van Zanten
To cite this version:
Agnès Van Zanten. The Sociology of Elite Education. Apple Michael W, Ball Stephen J,
Gandin Luis Armando. The Routledge International Handbook of the Sociology of Education,
Routledge, pp.329-339, 2009. <hal-00972726>
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The sociology of elite education
Agnès van Zanten
Research on elites (that is, on status groups that occupy dominant positions) is characterized
by the lack of connection between studies that focus on elite recruitment and those that focus
on the exercise of power by elites. As underlined by Giddens (1974), both types of approach
are important and should complement each other in the analysis of mediations between the
class structure, the organizational structure and the power structure in a given society. Giddens
also insists on the need for recruitment studies to take account of two different dimensions: the
types of channel that are privileged by elite groups to reproduce their social position, and the
degree of social closure or openness of these channels to other groups (Parkin, 1974). This
distinction is used to organize the present chapter, which focuses on a single channel that has
come to play a crucial role in post-industrial societies, that is schools and, more precisely, uppersecondary and higher education institutions, and on their influence in three different national
contexts: France, the United Kingdom and the United States. In the first section, the specific
features of elite education are examined. The second section explores the extent and modes of
institutional and social closure.
Socialization patterns in elite educational institutions
Elite schools as total institutions
Studies of elite education have underscored the common features of elite educational institutions
that distinguish them from other institutions that look after young people from the same age
cohorts. The interlocking character of these features allows elite institutions to be described as
‘total institutions’ that provide, through both formal and ‘hidden’ curricula, a strong secondary
socialization model for students that will decisively influence their public and private adult life
(Faguer, 1991). Two of the most visible ones are physical closure and small size, which contribute
to distinctiveness as well as inclusiveness (Wakeford 1969). These two elements were important
characteristics of boarding schools and of the most exclusive colleges in the UK and the US,
until at least World War II. Because of the location of the French classes préparatoires aux grandes
écoles in Paris and other big cities, physical closure was less marked, although most students,
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especially those coming from distant towns and rural areas, were boarders. In the grandes écoles
themselves, boarding was the rule.1 By relocating outside Paris in recent decades, moreover,
some of them, such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole of Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC),
have recreated to a certain extent the ‘campus’ atmosphere of their English and American
counterparts, though on a much smaller scale. Internal cohesion has also been fostered and
maintained over time in elite institutions by sophisticated rites marking entrance and departure,
as well as important moments of the educational experience, by procedures concerning the
allocation of boarding rooms and of various material tasks and by learning and social activities
meant to develop a strong ‘bonding’ relationship among members and especially between
‘established’ students and new entrants, as well as between institutions and their alumni. These
organizational forms have been strongly influenced by army and religious traditions and are
frequently referred to through idiosyncratic terms that serve as social markers of membership.
Studies have also focused on the distinctive and exclusive character of the social culture
prevailing in these institutions, notably on the prominent place occupied by sports and various
games, some of which are practised only in elite boarding schools, and on the crucial
socialization role played by fraternities, sororities, clubs and associations (Abraham, 2007;
Cookson and Persell, 1985a). Elite institutions were also long characterized by a specific academic
curriculum (Bernstein, 1977). This curriculum was distinctive in point of its content (with a
key role attributed to Latin and the humanities and, in France, to mathematics), its pedagogy,
which privileged individual modes of instruction (taking the form of ‘tutorials’ in British elite
colleges or ‘colles’ in French classes préparatoires, i.e. individual work sessions and evaluations by
older students and professors), and its evaluation modes (the creation of specific college
entrance examinations in England and the US and of concours for access to the grandes écoles in
France). Academic distinctiveness has also been reinforced by the gender, educational and social
profile of professors in these institutions – in particular, those of public school masters and
Oxbridge ‘dons’ in England (Walford, 1984).
Educating the upper class
These dimensions of elite education are the outcome of explicit and implicit choices made by
teachers and administrators and show the relative autonomy that these educational institutions
enjoy by virtue of their symbolic, cultural, social and economic capital (Bourdieu, 1996).
However, the ability of elite institutions to form their students is constrained by the expectations
of dominant groups (Kamens, 1974). They work according to a social ‘charter’, that is a licence
and mandate to produce specific educational subjects (Meyer, 1970), differing from those of
institutions that cater to non-elite groups. This charter is subject to variations depending on
the interests, values and ideas of the upper-class fractions that occupy or aspire to elite positions
at a given time in each national context.
Although the expressive and moral dimensions mentioned above have been central elements
of elite educational institutions in the three countries considered here, emphasis on sports and
social life has been much more important in England than in France, owing to the prevalence
of an educational model reflecting the aristocratic values and gentlemanly lifestyles of the
nineteenth-century ‘leisure class’. Elite schools were a key element in the dissemination of this
model among other elite and middle-class groups during the first half of the twentieth century
(Anderson, 2007). This model was also ‘borrowed’ by America’s old money families when they
sought to consolidate themselves and to build, through education in private prepatory schools
and elite colleges, a ‘class wall’ separating old privileges from upstarts (Soares, 1999). On the
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other hand, the academic culture of elite educational institutions has been more distinctive in
England and France than in the US, reflecting a historically constructed, ‘high-brow’, aristocratic
and bourgeois culture (Cookson and Persell, 1985b), but it places a greater emphasis on the
mastery of intellectual knowledge and skills in France than in England.
The charters of elite educational institutions in each country are nevertheless subject to
changing external pressures resulting from status group struggles (Karabel, 1984). Historical
analysis of the most prestigious American colleges (Yale, Princeton, Harvard) shows the
transition from an emphasis on the non-academic side of campus life, which helped students
master the subtleties of the dominant status culture and accumulate contacts crucial for success
in large organizations and the political field in the early decades of the twentieth century, to a
more academically oriented curriculum in the 1960s and 1970s. These changes reflect the
difficulty of providing a common social model for a larger and increasingly heterogeneous upper
class, with diverging interests, values and ideas, and show the growing influence of its most
culturally endowed fractions. The influence of these fractions on the academic culture and social
atmosphere of elite secondary schools and higher education institutions was also visible at the
same period in England, although it was exerted indirectly, through the mediating action of
the state. In France, the emphasis on academic culture was more precocious and more radical,
as the French Revolution replaced the aristocratic ideal of the ‘honnête homme’ with a bourgeois
model emphasizing scholastic merit.
Preparing for political and economic power positions
It thus appears that, although upper-class groups have always tried to frame the charter of elite
institutions, this charter is also subject to variations according to more general economic, social
and political factors that might lead interest and political groups acting on behalf of elites, but
also reflecting contradictions and struggles among established and new status groups, to
encourage elite institutions to act as ‘guardians’ of national cultural models and stratification
patterns, or as agents of innovation and diffusion of new cultural or social ideals. The role of
the state as political mediator between conflicting status groups’ interests is particularly visible
in France, because it was the state that created or restructured the most prestigious grandes écoles
after the French Revolution. Designed to serve state needs (those of the army and various
technical corps and later on of public administrations), the grandes écoles’ mandate has been to
produce individuals endowed with strong scientific competence and capable of synthesizing
large quantities of information, but also interested in practical matters and able to take decisions
(Thoenig, 1973). In Alvin Gouldner’s (1979) terms, these schools were expected to train the
‘technical intelligentsia’ more than the ‘humanistic intellectuals’. Their culture was from the
onset strongly distinct from the non-utilitarian university culture traditionally oriented towards
teaching, scholarship and research, although some institutions, especially the Ecole Normale
Supérieure, were clearly oriented towards the intellectual fractions of the upper class, whereas
others, such as l’Ecole Polytechnique, have been characterized throughout their history by
tensions between the divergent perspectives of scientists and engineers (Bourdieu, 1996;
Belhoste et al., 1994).
Strong state dependency has also influenced the non-academic activities and rites of these
institutions, which were designed to instill respect for state hierarchies and loyalty to state
institutions, at the same time that it has encouraged the development of ‘organic links’ between
the grandes écoles and the state corps through recruitment processes directly linking valued
positions in the most prestigious corps to class rank at graduation. However, since the 1970s,
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private firms and economic status groups have in various ways exerted a growing and more
direct pressure on French elite institutions. The oldest is the practice known as ‘pantouflage’ –
that is, the departure of civil servants trained in the traditional state grandes écoles for work in
the private sector (Suleiman, 1978). This movement coincided with the creation and growth
in the 1970s of privately funded grandes écoles with a strong market orientation. In the 1990s,
the state-funded grandes écoles began to follow suit, offering a larger number of courses and
activities meant to prepare students for direct access to jobs in private sector management and
finance (Lazuech, 1999). At the same time, in what can be seen as a kind of compensation for
decreasing material and symbolic returns of state investments in these special schools, many of
them have in the last ten years re-emphasized their social and political responsibility, especially
by taking a prominent role on debates and policies concerning widening participation in higher
education (van Zanten, 2008).
In England, public schools, as well as Oxford and, to a lesser extent, Cambridge, have
traditionally maintained what have been called ‘incestuous links of privilege and power’ with
the British establishment (Scott, 1990) and direct connections to the state and the professions.
In the US, ‘prep’ schools and elite private universities were also directly linked to economic
and political elite groups through their recruitment, funding and access to elite positions. The
general expectations from these groups and the organizations that they control have led to a
strong focus on leadership, ‘character’ and self-discipline (Cookson and Persell, 1985a).
Nevertheless, after World War II, elite institutions in England became strongly dependent on
the state for funding. Although the initial effect of state funds was to redirect education away
from action and business and towards research, in the 1980s, the state began to put pressure
on universities to become key elements in the global knowledge economy, orienting research
towards industrial needs, especially high technology, and students’ career choices towards highpaying jobs in the private sector (Brown and Hesketh, 2004). This latter tendency is particularly
evident in elite American universities, which are extremely dependent on private endowments
for their growth, which in turn determines their capacity to occupy the top places in
international rankings of leading research institutions and to play an important role in global
economic networks.
Social and institutional closure
The conditions of admission
Elite institutions have always enjoyed a large autonomy in setting their own conditions for
admission (Douglass, 2007). However, although the admission criteria that they have devised
reflect, above all, internal compromises between administrators and teachers and responses to
competitive external pressures from similar organizations, they are also conditioned by changes
in the distribution of power among status groups in the broader society (Bourdieu and Passeron,
1977; Karabel, 2005; Karen, 1990). In France, the state’s early creation of a system of highly
competitive examinations, ranking students according to a one-dimensional scale of merit for
access to elite ‘special schools’, gave professors a high degree of latitude in the choice of future
members of the elite vis-à-vis families and social or economic constituencies, while
simultaneously endowing elites with a strong belief in their individual and social legitimacy as
members of a ‘state nobility’ (Bourdieu 1996; Young, 1994). At the same time, the present
extremely ‘balkanized’ system of competitive examinations for entrance to the grandes écoles is
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less the reflection of academic interests than a legacy of the powerful influence of the state
corps that framed and have strongly controlled their functioning.
In the UK and in the US, the transition from ‘ascriptive’ criteria to an educational
meritocracy was slower, and the notion of educational merit has been subjected to more diverse
interpretations than in France. Entry at Oxford and Cambridge was, until World War II, based
on a system of examinations in which merit was equated with the mastery of a traditional
curriculum, though school and family connections also played an important role. The Oxbridge
system of recruitment was formally realigned to that of other universities in the 1960s, following
the increase in government funding and involvement. Nevertheless, recent investigation reveals
the persistence of distinctive features. As in other universities, the results obtained by students
in subject-specific, nationally standardized tests, that is GSCE grades (three A*, the highest grade,
in the disciplines considered as the most relevant for the desired university subject are expected),
and teachers’ predictions of A level exam results (in 1983, 82.4 per cent of the Oxford entering
class had top A level scores, the proportion has now reached almost 100 per cent) are the crucial
elements in the first phase of admission. However, during the second phase, the various colleges
take other elements into account. These are both meritocratic (results in specific language tests
or qualities exhibited in the best two school essays and, more recently, as in the US, results on
Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs)) and non-meritocratic, such as family and school background,
which is assessed in closer examination of admission forms and interviews with tutors.2
Until the 1960s, students in the US mainly gained admission to four-year colleges by
graduating with good grades from high school. However, elite private institutions, imitating
Oxford and Cambridge, developed their own entry examinations in order to limit student
numbers and increase their legitimacy. The SAT, introduced in the 1930s, progressively became
an important component of the admission process, reinforcing the cognitive dimension of merit.
However, when this system started to give a clear advantage to brilliant Jewish students, elite
institutions and dominant groups once again reinforced the weight assigned to extra-academic
criteria such as ‘character’ (determined on the basis of high school teacher recommendations),
participation in extracurricular activities, autobiographical essays and interviews that could be
used to legitimately exclude ‘inassimilable’ non-WASP students. Nevertheless, by the late 1950s,
in an atmosphere of intense concern about ‘talent loss’, ‘character’ began to lose ground to the
intellectually gifted applicant defined according to SAT scores, Grade Point Average (GPA)
and class rank, as well as excellence in one or more extracurricular endeavours. A new turn
was once again taken in the 1960s with the introduction of a new criterion: ‘diversity’. Since
its relationship to academic merit was not to be systematically defined, its adoption proved
nevertheless highly controversial (Karabel, 2005; Soares, 2007).
Institutional routes
Institutional routes played an important role in the creation and consolidation of elite educational
systems. The ‘bonding’ relationship between a small number of elite colleges and secondary
schools was based on the ‘chartering’ process described above, that is on the monopolization
of a mode of training and socialization required for admission to elite institutions of higher
education, but also, especially in the US and the UK, on a ‘bartering’ process – that is,
negotiations between school and college personnel concerning selection and admission (Persell
and Cookson, 1985). However, this ‘institutional sponsorship’ was officially abandoned as the
result of the expansion and of the increasing formal meritocratic dimension of educational systems
(Turner, 1960). The most radical departure from this ‘institutional sponsorship’ has taken place
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in the US, where elite colleges have developed admission policies that severely hamper the
effectiveness of ‘bridging strategies’ from secondary school feeders, except for a limited number
of prep schools that still hold a special status because of their historical relationships with Harvard,
Princeton or Yale (Le Tendre et al., 2006). The importance attached to academic merit – and,
in particular, class rank – has simultaneously allowed elite colleges to recruit excellent
undergraduate students nationwide and led ‘star schools’ (schools that are particularly successful
in getting students admitted to elite universities) to maximize the chances of their best students
at the expense of those who have excellent test scores and high GPA earned in rigorous courses,
but are not at the top of their class (Attewell, 2001). Despite this relative disadvantage, students
in these schools – many, but not all, private – still benefit not only from a stronger focus on
academic achievement by teachers and parents than students in other schools, but also from
specific Honours and Advanced Placement courses that act as a ‘signal’ for college admissions
staff (Falsey and Heyns, 1984) and from their ‘brokering’ strategies, that is from strong financial
investment in and commitment to activities favouring the college-linking process, such as college
visits, assistance with college and financial aid applications, and contacts with college
representatives on behalf of the students (Hill, 2008; McDonough, 1997).
Institutional routes and sponsorship have also been weakened in England, but not to the
same extent: a strong link remains between private secondary schools and elite higher education
institutions. Privately schooled students are twice as likely to go to elite universities than stateschooled students and, although outnumbered by the latter in admissions (44.5 per cent versus
46.8 per cent in 2007 at Oxford), they are significantly overrepresented in relation to their
total number in secondary schools. This overrepresentation is even more striking when one
considers their share of the applicant pool and percentage among successful applicants. Given
the expansion of the state sector and the strong meritocratic character of the admission
procedures in elite universities, this overrepresentation is due less to explicit ‘chartering’ and
‘bartering’ than in the past. It is nevertheless important to note that, as in the US, students from
private schools benefit from higher levels of advice and support on careers in higher education
by internal staff and outside agencies working with the schools (Reay et al., 2005), and that
those from the so-called Clarendon Public Schools, in particular, frequently receive ‘special
notification’ during the second phase of admissions at Oxford. However, the competitive
advantage of private schools rests now to a larger extent on higher levels of educational
achievement. These are the consequence of severe academic selection procedures as well as of
the implementation over the course of the 1980s and 1990s of an Assisted Places Scheme
(abolished by New Labour in 1997), intended to help ‘able children from modest backgrounds’
to enter independent schools of high academic reputation, but also of more marked ‘school
effects’ linked to the concentration of academically and socially advantaged students (Halsey,
1995; Power et al., 2003).
In France, on the contrary, the role of the state in elite education has given a competitive
advantage to state lycées in admissions, with the evidence showing no clear advantage for upperclass students from private sector schools in terms of educational careers (Tavan, 2004). There
are no official routes, but huge differences between lycées concerning their capacity to get students
admitted into these classes. This result is strongly linked to provision, as those ‘prépas’ that are
most successful in getting students admitted to the top grandes écoles are all located in a limited
number of old and prestigious lycées in Paris and other big cities, giving an advantage to students
schooled at those lycées. In addition to that ‘location effect’, there is also some evidence that
widening participation in secondary education has encouraged professors and administrators in
the more selective classes préparatoires to weigh the grades, class rank and professional evaluations
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of candidates according to the supposed achievement level of their lycée.3 Being accepted in
these selective classes préparatoires is a key step for students who want to follow up their studies
in the top grandes écoles, as there is a strong ‘chartering’ effect, both formal (teaching content,
methods and evaluation are strongly conditioned by the explicit requirements of the concours
of these grandes écoles, while less selective classes préparatoires prepare for less-selective examinations)
and informal (use of knowledge of implicit requirements based on information provided by
alumni, examiners, professors and managers at the grandes écoles). Students attending prestigious
lycées and classes préparatoires also benefit from personalized counselling and assistance with
applications.
Social advantage and parental strategies
In the three countries considered here, upper-class families strongly supported the initial
institutional pathways that excluded other groups from access to elite higher education
institutions. Although they have been able to resist and adapt to the development of meritocratic
policies by these institutions, thanks to the competitive advantages provided by private schooling
and selective public schools, and although in the US affluent upper-class parents, especially
former alumni, have been able, much more so than in England or France, to continue to buy
entrance for their children – not only because they can pay for tuition but also because they
provide ‘legacies’ that contribute to university budgets – as a group, they have had to renounce
collective admission privileges and accept that only some of their children with excellent
academic results might be among the ‘chosen’ (Karabel, 2005). Moreover, members of this
group now compete with larger proportions of members of the middle class. However, the
respective advantages of middle-class families with high levels of cultural capital and those families
with high incomes still have to be assessed carefully with respect both to the strategies available
for parents and to the selection and channelling process in each educational system (Kerchoff
et al., 1997). In France, the intellectual fractions of the middle class have traditionally been
advantaged by the formal and strongly scholastic meritocratic procedures of access to the
state grandes écoles. However, changes in the educational context have forced them to develop,
through ‘colonization’ of local schools, new, informal institutional pathways to maintain their
position (Raveaud and van Zanten, 2007). Their advantages are also challenged, however,
because, as in the UK and the US, families with higher incomes are able successfully to transform
economic capital into cultural capital through residential and school choice, private tuition and
private preparations for tests and competitive examinations (Ball, 2003; Johnson, 2006; van
Zanten, 2003).
Another, even more important question concerns the extent to which this renewed ‘class
meritocracy’ has closed off opportunities for other social and ethnic groups. Although meritocracy was initially conceived as serving the interests of hard-working students from dominated
groups who could benefit from scholarships to go to elite universities, there has been a growing
recognition of the existence of important inequalities of access. In response to strong social
pressures, in the 1960s, elite US institutions developed ambitious ‘affirmative action’ policies
giving an edge to Black, Hispanic and Native American candidates. This involved accepting
candidates from ‘tagged’ groups with SAT scores a bit lower than other candidates yet still
within the thresholds established by each university, as well as taking into account their capacity
to succeed under ‘adverse circumstances’. Such measures were needed because, for reasons linked
to their family background and secondary school careers in poor and underperforming schools,
candidates from these groups could not compete on an equal, ‘meritocratic’ basis. They
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nevertheless generated strong discontent, especially from the best-performing groups (Asians,
in particular), in a context of ‘college squeeze’: a rise in the number of college-age students
and a slow down of higher education expansion. In response to moves on the part of some
states to make affirmative action illegal, some elite public universities (the University of Texas,
the University of California) have adopted ‘percentage plans’ to recruit students from the largest
possible number of high schools using class rank as the main indicator. While this measure has
increased ethnic and social diversity in these universities, its success depends on the existence
and maintenance of strong levels of segregation in high schools (Alon and Tienda, 2007). Elite
private schools, on the other hand, count more on ‘comprehensive reviews’ of each proposal
for achieving diversity. These reviews are more effective in detecting meritorious students from
disadvantaged backgrounds without ‘side effects’, but they are very costly to implement.
In France efforts to increase social and ethnic diversity in elite higher education institutions
have been much more modest. In 2001, Sciences Po developed a specific selection procedure
for students from disadvantaged schools based on a specific academic exercise – a press summary
– and interviews with a jury including scholars, administrators, public civil servants and
managers from private firms (Sabbagh, 2002). Other less well-known institutions, such as the
INSA (Institut National des Sciences Appliquées), have developed a selection procedure based, for
half of the entrants, not on absolute results but on class rank. It is important to note that these
two institutions recruit their students after the lycée, which allows them much more autonomy
to set up original admission criteria than the écoles, which select their students after the classes
préparatoires. They remain, in fact, isolated cases, and most institutions have only developed as
elite universities in the UK outreach programmes providing information, assistance with the
preparation of college applications and financial support for disadvantaged students. Although
these programmes can be effective in limiting processes of self-exclusion due to institutional,
cultural and economic factors when they are integrated into procedures including changes in
the modes of selection, their impact seems limited when they are applied in isolation. It is also
important to note that not all working-class and minority students are willing to submit to the
cultural and social requirements of elite institutions, and that the kind of social capital they
possess (strong bonding ties with members of their family and local community) not only
constitutes a handicap for access but also prevents them profiting, to the same degree as middleand upper-class students, from the social capital that these institutions provide (Allouch and
van Zanten, 2008; Reay et al., 2005).
Conclusion
This brief overview of elite education in the US, the UK and France has shown that, although
elite institutions supported by established elite groups generally exhibit a strong reluctance to
change, important transformations have taken place and are still at work in all three systems.
The most important transformation, especially in the UK and US, took place after World War
I, with the transition from an almost direct translation of social position into educational
advantages, to the selection of talented individuals by educational institutions. Although this
movement increased the autonomy and power of educational agents, it allowed only limited
mobility opportunities for members of socially and ethnically dominated groups, as a new ‘class
meritocracy’ emerged based on exclusionary processes exhibiting some differences between the
three countries according to the relative importance of money, morals, manners or academic
culture in class divisions (Lamont, 1992; Power et al., 2003).
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Also, although this article has mostly focused on changes in modes of social and institutional
closure that have had significant consequences for educational and social inequalities, it is
important to relate these to other changes linked to global transformations in the knowledge
economy. These influences are creating new dividing lines between institutions, depending on
their relationship to different economic sectors and their place in international networks and
rankings, as well as between social groups, according to their capacity to integrate these new
opportunities in their strategies of exclusion or usurpation (Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Wagner,
2007). These new divisions and their concomitant class strategies require specific attention from
sociology of education research.
Notes
1
2
3
The largest part of the French elite is not trained, as elsewhere, in universities but at the grandes
écoles, which are distinct institutions of higher education. To prepare for the competitive examinations
allowing acess to these écoles, most students follow two- or three-year courses at classes préparatoires.
Although these are more or less equivalent to undergraduate university studies, they are located in
the lycées.
A. Allouch’s personal communication based on ongoing Ph.D. research on English and French elite
higher education institutions’ admission procedures and outreach programmes.
Evidence on these processes is being collected and analysed in an ongoing project on elite education
in France. For more details see van Zanten (2008).
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